1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to a semiconductor light emitting device and, more particularly, to a semiconductor light emitting device having a structure in which a plurality of light emitting cells are arranged, and a light emitting module and an illumination apparatus including the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, a semiconductor light emitting device, having advantages as a light source in terms of output, efficiency and reliability, has been actively studied and developed as a high output, high efficiency light source that may be used in a backlight of a display device or in various illumination apparatuses.
In order to use an LED as an illuminating light source commercially, an LED may be required to have a high degree of luminance efficiency and incur low manufacturing costs, while providing a desired high level of output. However, if a rated current is increased to thereby obtain a high degree of luminous flux in an LED chip having the same area as a high output LED, current density may also be increased to degrade luminance efficiency, and heating of the device may accelerate the luminance efficiency thereof (i.e., luminance efficiency may be degraded due to an increase in current density and a degradation of luminance efficiency may be accelerated due to heating of the device).
Meanwhile, in order to alleviate the problem of current density, a method of increasing the area of an LED chip may be considered, but in this case, it may be difficult to implement a uniform current density across the entire area of the chip and a high production yield may be difficult to obtain.
Thus, as a solution to this problem, a method of implementing an epitaxial layer, for an LED grown on a single substrate, to form a plurality of LED cells through an isolation process and connecting the plurality of LED cells may be taken into consideration. Here, during the isolation process, slopes of surfaces of the respective LED cells are required to be sufficiently gentle to allow a metal for connecting the plurality of LED cells to be easily deposited thereon. In this case, however, since a large amount of the epitaxial layer may be removed during the isolation process, an effective light emitting area (i.e., the area of an active layer) may be drastically reduced.